The Staff of the Winds (The Wizard of South Corner Book 1) (20 page)

The two shook hands, and Jack edged back around the hill, ran to his horse, replaced the halter with his bridle, checked and tightened the cinch, then trotted into the woods to the north. He intended to swing wide so that he could not be seen from the tower wood, then converge on the track to South Corner well in front of the gorn.

Marian moved carefully up the hill and around to the rocks so that she could see the trail between the watchtower and the castle.  There was no sign of movement.  The gray smoke from the gorns’ campfire still rose in a plume into the morning sky, but as Marian watched, it slowly dwindled. Perhaps the gorn had left the tower unmanned. She dared not go check.

When she had asked Jack’s opinion earlier, she was hoping for the answer she had received. It was one thing to sneak up on the tower when it was the three of them and the gorn didn’t know that anyone from South Corner was near by, and even last night when she was with Jack and they were pretty sure that the tower was empty, but it would be something else entirely to do it now in broad daylight, all by herself, with the gorn alerted by the discovery of their earlier attack. Marian reckoned that she was brave enough, if barely, but that was tempting fate just a little too far.

Marian lay motionless on the grass for what she was sure was at least an hour. There was no sign of movement either in what she could see of the tower wood, or along the trail back to the castle. The gorn they had seen earlier had long since traveled out of sight behind the hills to the northeast.

She spent the time thinking about how she was going to get the brass staff head away from Owen.  It was clear from their earlier experiment that it did not want to leave Owen’s possession.  What would it do if she tried to take it from Owen while he slept?  Perhaps she could use a stick to roll it into a sack, then throw the sack into the river.  Would the sack burst into flame if she tried that?  Hopefully, Owen could still be made to see the danger he was in, and he would dispose of it himself, but Marian was doubtful. The staff head was influencing him, and Marian was not sure that her brother would listen to reason.

Finally, Marian carefully edged back around the hill and moved down to collect her horse. For the past little while, she felt an itch between her shoulder blades as though someone were trying to sneak up behind her. After brushing up the grass where they had camped and the horses had stood the night, and making sure that they had left nothing behind, she followed Jack’s course into the trees to the north then swung west toward the castle. If watchful eyes had spotted them on the hill overlooking the tower woods, and observed their individual departures, Marian had failed to see them.

Chapter 7

Broken Threads

“Enter.”

Commander Furstiv al Bardon sat at a plain wooden table, the morning light shining through the window and across the report he was writing. He had taken a room on the first floor of an old inn that stood at the edge of the square across from the castle gate as his office. The room had once been a small library with a high vaulted ceiling. There was a fireplace at one end, and the walls were lined with shelves. Many of the shelves were still stocked with books, most decayed beyond use, but surprisingly, some were still readable if handled very carefully. The library’s former furnishings were gone, but his aide had located a table and a few serviceable chairs.

“Ah, Captain Saglam. I am just completing a report for Lord Sorcerer Kadeen to inform him of your successes. We’ll need a runner to take it back to him, someone agile and surefooted to make it safely across the bridge.”

“I’ve just the man, sir.”

“Kadeen will not be pleased that you were unable to recover the wizard’s staff. I’ll pick out a couple of the prettiest village girls to accompany the messenger. I know the sorcerer’s tastes, and perhaps their presence will soften the loss of the staff sufficiently that the messenger will not be executed when he delivers the message.

“I’m also acquainting him with our status here and the condition of the bridge over the deep.  If he tries to go ahead with our original plan and send us engineers and slaves to remove the dam that holds back the Deep, we’ll lose most of them in the crossing.  We’ll have to make do with what we have until Sardang can bring us more of the locals.

“Put a detail to work on the front gate. I want it serviceable so that a small squad can hold this fortress in case any of the local farmers try to interfere before we have them all rounded up. Also, send a squad out to inspect the condition of the walls and any sally ports or minor gates, and put a detail to removing any vines or creepers that might be used to scale the walls.  I want this position secure before we move the prisoners across the river to start excavating the dam.

“We don’t have enough men to send out proper patrols, and I don’t expect any activity in the neighborhood for some time, but set a strong watch on the castle walls and make sure that the men are alert. That’s all for now. Any questions?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. Get to it, Captain. Send me the runner first.”

As he watched Captain Saglam depart, Furstiv thought to himself that he should have asked him to send his most shiftless, most expendable soldier to carry the message back. Kadeen was not known for his ability to handle disappointment with equanimity. Even if the messenger survived the delivery of his message, which was doubtful, there was no sense risking a top soldier on a round trip excursion over that disintegrating bridge. ‘I hope he’s smart enough to have caught that message,’ he thought.

With a sigh, Furstiv signed the message to Kadeen, folded it, and sealed it with his signet ring. As the wax was cooling, a disheveled soldier entered and reported to the Commander. He was a little smaller than most, and bore the marks of countless unsuccessful brawls.

“Regular Soldier Stangar reporting as ordered, Commander,” the soldier declared, coming belatedly to attention under al Bardon’s fierce gaze.

“I’ve a report here for you to deliver to Lord Sorcerer Kadeen, Soldier Stangar” al Bardon said. “It is for his eyes only; is that clear?”

“Yes, Commander.”

“Make sure that it is. If this goes astray, it’ll be your hide, Soldier.”

“Yes, sir. I understand, sir,” Stangar responded, a tremor in his voice.

“Alright, come with me. There’s something else I want you to deliver to the Lord Sorcerer.”

Commander al Bardon led the way out of the inn and over to the stable where the villagers were being held, collecting half a dozen additional men along the way. Entering, he stopped to talk to the sergeant of the guards.

“Are they giving you any problems, Sergeant?”

“No Commander, sir.  They’s quiet as can be.  Most of them still have their hands bound, of course, all except the water girls, sir.”

“Good. We’ll keep them that way until we can get them in leg irons. After that, we can put them to work. Worked hard enough, they won’t have the energy to cause us any trouble.

“I need to pick out a couple of girls to send back to Baraduhne. Are all the prisoners here now?”

“Yes, sir. All except them that we moved to the cells last night, and none of them was girls, sir.”

“All right, Sergeant. I brought along a little help. I’ll identify what I want, and you and your men separate them out to the square. Be easy when you do it,” Furstiv added gruffly. “I don’t want them all marked up.”

“Yes, sir,” the sergeant answered with a gap-toothed grin. “Course some of ‘em tripped a time or two on the trek out here; you understand, sir.  None of ‘ems what you might call ‘damaged’, exactly, just bruised a little here and there, sir.”

“I’ll point them out, and you haul them out, Sergeant, and see that they don’t ‘trip’ in the process.”

Commander al Bardon worked his way through the prisoners, evaluating each one for their ability to work.  The women and girls he also considered for their suitability as appeasement for Kadeen.  Most dropped their eyes when confronted with al Bardon’s calculating, one-eyed stare, but a few, both men and women, returned it with a glare. Sarah and Brian Murray were both among the latter.

“Take that one and that one, sergeant,” al Bardon ordered, pointing to two of the prettier young women.

There were shouts of protest and some brief scuffling as the men of South Corner tried to protect the two girls chosen, but their struggle was quickly quelled by the cudgels of the guards and the girls were taken out of the stable. One was sobbing and crying as she was dragged away; the other merely continued to glare at al Bardon. Another face was added to her growing list.

In the courtyard, al Bardon looked the two young women over again in the daylight. “They’ll do. Put that one in the back,” he said, point to the tight-lipped auburn haired girl who still held her glare.

A light, strong line was tied around the necks of the two girls, much as it had been around Aaron Murray’s neck the night before. It allowed the girls about eight feet of separation, with a ten-foot lead at one end. Handing the lead rope and the sealed message to Stangar, the Commander growled, “Here’s your package and here’s the message. Don’t make any stops or detours along the way, and make sure that they both make it to the Lord Sorcerer Kadeen intact. Do it as if your life depended on it, Soldier,” he said with an evil sneer, “because it does.”

Owen watched the castle through the night, until the moon finally set behind the peaks of the West Wall. Huddled in his cloak and his blanket, he was still shivering in the cold night breeze off of the mountains. In the crisp air, he could also occasionally smell a hint of odor from the Wizard’s Moat. The water there was not stagnant, there was a steady flow into it from the mountain streams, and it fed two rivers as output. Still, the water seemed to have a musty decayed smell to it, as though it were a pool on the edge of a swamp that lay over a forgotten graveyard. Owen shuddered at this mental image, and put his concentration back on the castle.

Since Marian and Jack had gone west to track the gorn, there had been no activity. Twice Owen thought that he detected a glint of metal reflecting moonlight along the wall above the ramp leading to the main gate, but it was so slight and gone so soon, that he could not be sure.

Mostly, Owen spent the time worrying about the sorcerer that had summoned his spirit and questioned him.  Could it only happen while he slept?  When Jack woke him, the contact was broken, and it had not resumed after his friends left.

He had no idea how he was to fight this sorcerer; just refusing to reveal his own name had been almost more than he could manage.  ‘
The pain had been growing to the point that I feared that I might die from it
,’ he thought, rubbing his chest beneath his cloak.  ‘
Would I have died had Jack not awakened me? What am I to do to prevent it from happening again; can I never sleep safely again?’

Somehow it was all tied up with the magic of the Old Wizard. He regretted now having picked up the headpiece from the wizard’s staff out of the destruction of his cottage. In fairness, it had probably already saved their lives more than once—he, Jack and Marian would have ridden close under the old watchtower, had he not seen it there the night before, and that gorn in the woods would certainly have killed Marian, and probably the rest of them as well, had he in the body of the owl not intervened—but was his sanity and possibly his life to be the price?

The meeting with that sorcerer had not been the doing of the Old Wizard’s magic, though it must somehow have been related.  If disposing of the headpiece would make him safe, return his life to him, he would do it in an instant, but he feared that it would not. The sorcerer had told him as much when he claimed to know his “essence” and be his “master”, his piercing black eyes gleaming through that veil of acrid green smoke, and Owen believed it to be true.  His only other choice was to somehow learn to use the curse that had been laid upon him.  The sorcerer seemed to think that he was someone’s student.  If he was to survive, a student was what he must become, but how he was to do so was still a mystery.  The Old Wizard was dead.  Who could teach what he so desperately needed to know?